Review of The Clanging Chimes of Doom by dema1020
14 June 2024
This review contains spoilers
Another wonderful tale featuring Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9. The Doctor goes to get an autograph from a bunch of celebrities doing a Christmas recording, only to find a refuge from space.
This leads to an amusing series of confrontations where more and more people from different time periods show up to try and either save or kill the refuge. It's the kind of gag I've seen in American Dad and Rick and Morty, but it makes sense in a show like Doctor Who with so much time travel that there would be a situation like this happening.
In the end, the Doctor solves things in a way that was fun. It's all very light, perhaps too much so. The complete lack of any named celebrity in the real world, along with the way that certain other details are sort of just brushed aside, hold back The Clanging Chimes of Doom, but only by a bit. I do also like how it forms a loose trilogy with The Little Things and Present Tense, with little references across all three short stories in the Christmas Treasury.